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Hi Foliovision Team,
Hope y’all are having a great weekend. Quick question for you…in the past day or two, I’ve had a few members message to me saying they’re getting an html5 video player error. In the past, this has been a temporary error that corrects itself after a few hours. I got the same error when I tested yesterday, but I forgot to take a screenshot. I still have a couple members saying they’re unable to watch videos. Do you know if Vimeo possibly changed something in their backend, or do you have any suggestions?
Thanks!
Devin
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I just wanted to post a quick follow up to this thread…I got some more feedback from one of my members that’s having issues with the player working on her computer. She’s using Safari and is using os x 10.6.8. I did some testing on my two mac pros (one with 10.11.6 and one with 10.10.5) and it looks like the quality switching buttons aren’t working on Safari for me…the video loads at the low 360p but gets hung up if you try to increase the quality. Everything’s good to go on chrome and safari on my end.
Anyways, thanks again! Hope that helps narrow stuff down.
Devin
Hello Devin,
sorry about the delay, we have a state holiday yesterday.
Vimeo’s CDN provider Fastly has deprecated TLS below version 1.2. It affects users of Android 4.x who don’t use the latest Firefox browser. We added a warning for these users in FV Player 6.0.5.24 which we released now, it tells them to install Firefox. Hopefully Vimeo can somehow ask Fastly to postpone the upgrade to requiring TLS 1.2.
Perhaps the issue affects old OS X as well, we will test that.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
That makes sense…I guess Vimeo is trying to force out the old technology. I just updated to v24. Let me know about the Safari when you find out…I’m still unable to make the quality switching buttons work on my Safari and I think my browser and computer is pretty up-to-date.
Thanks a lot for all the help!
Devin
Hello Devin,
I checked and Safari version 5 which is the stock browser in OS X 10.6.8 also has issues with the new TLS enforced by Vimeo’s CDN.
They are working on making sure the transmission is smoother, but sooner or later TLS 1.2 will be the new standard and these old browsers might have trouble using internet at all.
We put in a note suggesting users to use Firefox if a playback fails for a Vimeo video (the routine for that is complex, as Samsung phones or Android 4.0.4 built-in browser doesn’t trigger any error for these issues).
Regarding the quality switching – if you are not using MPEG-DASH option, then perhaps it’s picking up the Vimeo’s HLS stream. Sorry if we haven’t answered your question about that if you asked it somewhere, but could you please post some URL where we can see the problem?
Quality switching on countryguitaronline.com works well for me in Safari 9.1.3 on OS X 10.9.5. It was playing MP4 video and so was Google Chrome, so you are not using the MPEG-DASH option.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Thanks for all the info. Really appreciate all your help. I wonder if my student with the 10.6.8 is just behind on her software updates on her computer? Or do you think it’s possible her mac is so old that she can’t go higher than 10.6.8? All this cross browser/device compatibility is such a pain!
The video quality switching with the MPEG-DASH is working great on my newer mac pro with the larger screen, but it’s still forcing 4k on my older mac and won’t play the video — here’s a link to a screencapture https://vimeo.com/216835173/2f21e9c1b0 It seems like this older mac can’t handle anything higher than 1080p…it won’t play it smoothly and the picture looks funny because the screen doesn’t have a high enough resolution. The older mac has OSX 10.10.5…if it helps, it has 13 inch, Early 2011, 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB memory, Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB. I’m definitely ready to switch to the MPEG-DASH option but I’ll probably hold out until it’ll play smoothly on my older mac here…I’m guessing several of the older folks using my site probably have older computers than this one.
For the manual quality switching on Safari, you can try this link here https://countryguitaronline.com/country-hybrid-picking-chord-embellishments/ This video will load fine at 360p, but when I click to increase the quality, it gets hung up and shows the loading dots. This happens on both of my macs…one with OSX 10.11.6 and the older with 10.10.5.
Hope this helps! Thanks again for all the help, and let me know if you need more info.
Devin
Hey Martin,
Just thought I’d follow up on my previous message and tell you that my member just sent me an e-mail and said the player is working great for her now. Good news! Maybe Vimeo just corrected something on the backend with their CDN.
Thanks again,
Devin
Hello Devin,
it still doesn’t work on my Android 4.4 phone, so I’m not sure why it works for your client, it might just be random.
We have to fix the MPEG-DASH to not automatically switch to highest possible quality.
I see the issue on https://countryguitaronline.com/country-hybrid-picking-chord-embellishments/ when using Safari 9.1.3 on OS X 10.9.5, but not on our website. I’ll have a look into it.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Yeah, maybe it was random then. Sounds great, keep me posted!
Devin
Hello Devin,
I was looking into the Safari issue with Quality Switching and found no explanation so far. I tried to create a minimal player configuration and it was still failing, even though it would work perfectly on my test site or foliovision.com. I also tried to switch the video and it wouldn’t help.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
That’s very strange. Well, if you can get the MPEG-DASH to not switch to the highest possible quality, I’d really like to use the MPEG-DASH because it’s working great on my newer mac pro…would be a great feature to add to the site. I’m excited about switching over. Maybe the safari issue with the manual switching is a random conflict on my site with another plugin…who knows. Let me know if you get the MPEG-DASH updated and I’ll do the testing on my older mac.
Thanks again,
Devin
Hi Martin,
Hope everything is going well. I just wanted to follow up on the MPEG-DASH and see if you’ve been able to figure anything out as far as preventing the switching to the highest possible quality for older computers and smaller screen devices like my old Mac Pro. Do you think it will be possible to update? The manual quality switching is working great for my students but still excited to activate the auto quality switching with MPEG-DASH.
Thanks again!
Devin
Hello Devin,
I found a function in the DASH library to make sure the maximum quality respects the screen size.
I will setup a demo with 4K video before and after to that you can double check if you can feel the difference. Does your old Mac have retina display?
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Great! I’m excited to test it out. My old Mac does not have a retina but my new Mac does have one, so I can test both when you have them ready. Let me know.
Thanks!
Devin
Hello Devin,
please check here: https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash There are two videos and when you play them you will see a message like “Using 1920×1080 at 753 kbps” on top of each video. The second video is in 4K, so that one should be slow on your old Mac.
When you open https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash?limit you should see that the second video won’t go to 3840×2160 px but will respect the player size.
What’s let to improve is what happens when you take the video to fullscreen. Right now you must wait until further segments load before it switches to higher quality. But it’s really close to what YouTube does.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Nice! It’s working great on my older Mac now. Thanks for your great work on this. Really excited to add it on my website.
I tested the videos on my older Mac and on my newer Mac with retina.
Old Mac – https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash
The top video played smoothly with 1920×1080 at 753 kbps. The bottom video with MPEG-DASH with 3840×2160 at 24795 kbps kept pausing and couldn’t play well like before.Old Mac – https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash?limit
Top video played well with 640×360 at 190 kbps. The bottom video with MPEG-DASH with 640×360 at 938 kbps played perfectly.Old Mac – also tested full screen on the MPEG-DASH limit…played at 640×360 and eventually increased to 1280×720 at 3052 kbps and played smoothly the whole time. Great! It does look similar to YouTube and the other auto quality streaming I’ve seen out there. Looks good to me.
New Mac – https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash
The top video played well 1920×1080 at 753 kbps. The bottom played well 3840×2160 at 24795 kbps.New Mac – https://foliovision.com/player/demos/mpeg-dash?limit
The top video played well 1280×720 at 503 kbps. The bottom video played well 1280×720 at 3052 kbps.Thanks again for your work on this. I think the auto switching will be a huge selling point for the FV Player. Let me know when you’re able to push the update down to the plugin and I’ll switch it over on my site.
Thanks!
Devin
Hello Devin,
the improved MPEG-DASH quality switching which respects player size has been released in FV Player 6.1.2. FV Player Pro stays unchanged.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Great work! I just updated at Country Guitar Online and it’s working really well on both computers. Very happy with it. Really appreciate all the fine tuning you’ve done.
Thanks again,
Devin
